Live Music
Archive
Librivox
Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland
Museum of Art
Internet
Arcade
Console Living Room
Open Library
American
Libraries
TV News
Understanding
9/11Madness and Medicine
Video Item Preview
Share or Embed This Item
- Publication date
- 1977
- Topics
- Educational Film, Series: Madness and Medicine
- Item Size
- 28.7G
Madness and Medicine Reel 1
Reel 2 available here
A critical look at mental institutions and their diverse treatment programs which help some patients but prove damaging to others. Examines what happens to patients after they are discharged from an institution, showing how oftentimes their followup care is inadequate.
Search Educational Film Journals at Media History Project for references to this film
- Addeddate
- 2015-06-02 02:27:21
- Boxid
- IA113014
- Color
- color
- Identifier
- madnessandmedicinereel1
- Ocr
- You to. Do what you. Were. Wrong. This is what I and for me it has always said this is the pain of madness. The head isn't there but the head is huge and then it gets its. I don't know if I will. But being crazy looks like. Thing is is is fighting is harsh. It hurts. It's the most baffling of human afflictions its victims the most. The beginning. Exceeds our knowledge. We don't. Treat it. We even have trouble defining it the line between sanity and insanity is blurred it's sometimes hard to know where one ends and the other begins. You're supposed to go to church on Sunday. Tell bill on Saturday you supposed to listen to the still small voice that she should know better not. As a society we have little tolerance for bizarre behavior so we build huge institutions and look away and we don't get to the psychiatrist the task of curing or confining those whom we do not wish to see but psychiatry itself is under attack. Some within the profession think it is going in the wrong direction. Others mostly former patients think it harms more than it helps. Psychiatry isn't doing anything for me to give me nightmares for the rest of my life. To most Americans. Psychiatry as a couch chair a quiet room and lots of top mostly from the patient but in reality. Psychiatry is much more than that it's drugs and electric shock treatments and in rare instances brain operations to try to correct abnormal behavior. It's also huge institutions. Bod window restraints seclusion room locked wards and underlying all this is a nagging question what are we trying to treat what is mental illness. That's something I've been grappling with for the last fourteen years I don't have the answer to it. I consider myself a student of the matter and I don't know the answer. Generally speaking I think mental illness is being able. To cope with our society. Mental illness is a myth. Fraud a bad metaphor. An excuse a rationalization it's a religious viewpoint held by psychiatrists which says that human troubles are somehow medical in origin and medical in their solution. Now just how poverty unemployment. Unhappiness fights between husbands and wives. Beatings of children anxiety Alyea nation just how all these problems relate to medicine and related illness is never stated what is mental illness I don't know. Covers everything from people who feel slightly barely getting up in the morning one to people who are very serious suicide of the precious who are so disorganized by a psychosis that they kept functional also it covers a wide range of terms and conditions and maybe in some of it's in the patients are if it gets serious enough it's in societies are. So term. How we embrace us. Difficult term there are people who can't function and for them the end of the line is a mental institution. There are four hundred ninety five institutions in the United States three hundred thirteen of them are run by the states the others pride at any given time about two hundred thousand people are hospitalized. All told Son ten million Americans have been in mental institutions and countless millions of others have sought help from various kinds of therapists this report is about those not to be so seriously disturbed the drastic and sometimes dangerous treatments or you asked. Many end up in mental institutions where is much easier to get in then it is to get out. I ritually when a man on the fiddle. Voluntarily and. Series of events. Coming in getting committed because mainly because I was trying to get out of the winter in which are supposedly involuntary patients they told me that. To leave. When I said no right to leave any way to tell me that it wasn't in New York State they can commit you for sixty days on a signature to doctors you don't go to court and in two months that's a long time especially in a state hospital which is a pretty grim. Isolated lonely most state hospitals look like prisons. This one not a state hospital in California looks like on campus but once inside there's no mistaking what it is. The key is the symbol of freedom in a mental institution only staff members have keys and unless you have special privileges you can find to the Lord and you're at the mercy of the people who run that war in many places you can make phone calls. Your mail may be restricted and visitors are generally few and far between. Mark Jamie suppose a patient at one such ward at not the state hospital after a suicide attempt I was taken by Ward Q. was seven and I was taken to a they call them for clues and locked and fortunately I was not strapped down on to the money people are the lights were left on all night long I was very difficult to sleep no one can buy all night I was awake so I guess I could have rolled over and died and there are no one would have known the difference all the morning. People were put into seclusion for example for failure to well I take medication and he sort of verbal abuse towards psychiatric terror could result my trip down the corridor as it's called. That's a trip down the car can be the first thing that happens to you mean. This is a newly admitted patient. The staff is wearing. The seclusion room is part of every mental hospital. Sometimes it's called the quiet room are the Blue Room. I was on suicide precaution you had a choice to be just making out in the hall. Brett countered be a Christian way to strange horrible thing in solitary cases seven nights and I know her in my life wanted to die so badly it's not the slightest thing that Phil and I did not know what attitude I was supposed to get to get out of the I was threatened as supposedly a job that you will have to look at the rest of your life unless you get off to a cyber caution. I never wanted to die so badly it didn't get as as you know I mean getting out of that room I know that the people who did it to me had the best world but that does not excuse. By springs from age seven to Betty and least half the time life in solitary confinement and I can remember you know looking out through the. Winter if I was ever going to see you never going to be a little walk around the outside. Which you just heard. Even at that age I was that I was. That was supposed to help me every few days the psychiatrist become in surrounded by all the staff and tell me how I needed this was part of my treatment. Everything was done to you in this place is just part of the trick and your. I was. Eating I was put on the drinking water for two or three days and that was part of me. I was turned away from my parents by force occurrence among such a time I was pouring my therapy every kind of every conceivable thing is done to you there is called the this percentage of people on the outside as therapy to what is a head you know you know you're being tortured but you're being told you're being held to not only are you being told you better say you're being held and you better believe you're being caught did you keep saying you're being tortured you complaining about is a symptom of your illness. So so you have to say this black is writing War is peace in order for them to stop bothering with the do to your head and you can't think straight when you're treated like that's the way they preferred to language. All of the hospitals complain about a lack of money and person now. They say they would like to do more but can't. Individual therapy is practically unknown. Institutional psychiatry just are too busy serving as administrator to see their patients I distinctly remember sitting outside the door Dr Macy's door for like two hours because you couldn't get in to see Dr mace you just had to sort of sit there and if you came out you could catch him and say hey doctor may see you know so and so I got to see you. Was a yard with your disappear again so what do the patients do. Mark J. Street Life on the ward basically consisted of a lot of what I'm missing supply called T.V. There are a pain because that was about how my thing was to do people. What pace back and forth in the hall there was actually very little square for space for the number of people on the ward and this really out into the atmosphere of tension people would smoke cigarettes. Throw the but for those I didn't have money they would pick up the bad smoke down to the last possible. Lot of people just chronicle I stayed in bed all day there is one there are there that is used on just about every patient drug therapy and like every other psychiatric treatment how it works and if it works are matters of dispute. The psychiatric drugs were the wonder drugs of the one thousand nine hundred is. The Rosie the first of the major Transvaal I was given to several million patients within months of its introduction Since then dozens of others have come on the market there are now drugs for almost every condition drugs to Tran qualifies even are extreme highs and lows and drugs to lift you from your depression. The drugs couldn't have come at a better time. Patient populations were rising and the drugs promised to slow that growth. The drug companies were quick to exploit the market. Physicians were bombarded with advertisement brochures and other sales devices the drugs quickly became the preferred method of treatment but they cured nothing what they do. The symptoms of the owners and hopefully and even theoretically restore a biochemical balance in the central nervous system now in that sense is that something like a diabetic that receive sense once you can say Well I think my insulin every day my five minutes with the control but what if you ask me and I cured of diabetes they would have to say no. The drugs do seem to lessen the obvious symptoms of some mental illnesses particularly loose the notions and delusions of schizophrenia but they also have serious and sometimes fatal side effects when I was on for a scene I could not read I could not get past the first where in the paragraph now I had never had this problem before I became incredibly worried about being able to read and I didn't know it was a side effect. I'm using the word side effect was just as if it's something that's on the side of it was the primary effect you know the sex of the struggles to not make me realize that it was my old home I became terrified that I'd never be able to read again so it created a new problem and then I just you know began to worry about that the drugs are intended and do in fact do you completely because it interferes with your thinking make your body twists toward it makes your mouth dry if you're on Thorazine and several of the other so-called tranquilizers effects. Your sensitivity to light so that your head if you're out in the sun or even under bright light becomes very very painful and. Many kinds of sensations that you have no way to explain you don't know that it's the drugs. And so you think I must really be messed up because look what's happening to me. Dr David Richmond trained as a psychologist and now works in a mental health clinic in Oakland California. He writes frequently about the drugs and pamphlets and as Dr Caligari newspaper published by farmer mental patients one of the major problems with anti psychotics is that Mr muscle function so that people who take and I kind of drugs and he was stiff muscles with muscles that are rigid often with shaking tremors and their muscles they can also experience with. This tonic reactions are all the muscles going to spasm and that can also happen with the muscles your eyes looking up through the top of the ceiling and it's very painful and you can't control it and they're also muscle reactions called dyskinesia is really get these weird reading movement that you can't control you have an inability to sit still and you're constantly going down and all this is drug induced and it's often called schizophrenia or seen as a part of some person's mental illness when in fact the person is experiencing a drug reaction and the number of times that I've seen people experiencing drug reactions that label is craziness that. Short of death the most serious side effect of the drug is a condition called tardive dyskinesia. There is no known cure for Joseph blocked is one of it's. His ward psychiatry is to see the lives of those hospital in Washington D.C. is Dr Fuller Tory. Mr Blunt has virtually no signs of his original the signs that the movements are completely side effects of the drugs that he was on for twenty years. Mr Brown is quite rational he understands what's going on and if you're patient very rational conversation with the movement that he makes with his mouth and with his tongue he can't stop their involuntary movements he can slow them down by concentrating on them but as soon as he stopped concentrating on them then they come back in. Mr Brown also has some movements of his diaphragm when the diaphragm contract then it causes him to make sounds out of his mouth but that's all part of the same condition if it was not for the side effects of the drugs. Mr Blackwood probability be able to leave the hospital at least to live in a foster home. Few new patients in mental hospitals are aware of the side effects of the drug. They're rarely consulted about the treatment with the drugs it's a matter of taking them voluntarily are having them forced on you. I had to learn because I had been hospitalized twice before not to fight medication because I had a county hospital in a private hospital I had been strapped to a chair and several times the beds with legs arms and wants tried to move my arms in a tight leather around my middle so I couldn't breathe and I messed Matic and it didn't help and that's when I thought I was going to die so I didn't fight medication I just you know I was Calgary like an animal with sleep I was afraid. So I let them do what ever trip they decided to do on me by and raise you can make people take that with becomes a form of moral suasion you know people have a right to be crazy. I have a right to be crazy. I suppose people have a right to be crazy as long as they can function do they have a right to be hospitalized at the expense of other citizens when they could be got better if they took drugs and it's a I don't know the answer really now I think the general reasoning there has been that if a person is. Psychotic to the point that they are misinterpreting reality that the then the individual is not really able to make an informed judgment that this this applies not only to treatment this applies to making a Will making a contract getting married giving testimony participating in your own defense so I think that that is the instance in which in which it may be reasonable to. Insist that the treatment be carried out once you are legally allow someone to force a chemical like Thorazine or from listening to someone else's body then you open up a Pandora's box of abuses of people and unfortunately is the reality that I experienced in virtually every psychiatric ward investment time researchers are just now beginning to learn something about the drugs and their side effects and it's clear that dosage levels have to be tailored to individual patients. Some drugs can affect the kidneys are the heart and sudden deaths because of a previous ale not have happened but psychiatry is the physicians are more concerned with their patients emotional wellbeing than their physical world and the necessary tests for tolerance are rarely given. The drugs or medicine but is mental illness a disease. Most psychiatrists think so but many others don't. The believers say that there's a biological or genetic basis to mental illness and that there's a cure or out there somewhere they just haven't discovered it yet such an approach also assumes the psychiatry must be adopted because only doctors can treat on the illness. It's my belief which I think I can justify that in schizophrenia and the aspect of disorder is there there is quite compelling evidence that defect in the mind in the brain. Do exist and that the brain is not the same as that of a price in the show these phenomena you know illnesses are basically something which can be diagnosed by physicians where they're reliable tests which can be utilized to determine the nature of a problem and then some sort of rational treatment can be instituted and then you can follow this success or failure of the treatment by some sort of standardized means none of that really holds true when you try to carry this over into psychiatry and analogize from a medical model into emotional problems and I would prefer to use terms like emotional problems emotional distress mental distress but to stay away from the term illness or disease because there aren't any test that people can agree upon is how to decide what it is it's the sort of thing that distress seems to come and go whereas illnesses you know they're either diagnosable or they're not and I think the concept of illness and disease in psychiatry has led us down the path to some very very severe abuse is despite the uncertainty is about whether madness is an organic disease or reaction to the problems of living. Psychiatry's feel they asked to do something to relieve human misery. Drugs are one kind of treatment. Electric shock and psychosurgery are others.
- Run time
- 22:56
- Scanner
- Internet Archive HTML5 Uploader 1.6.3
- Sound
- sound
- Worldcat (source edition)
- 5642397
- Year
- 1977
comment
Reviews
6,584 Views
121 Favorites
DOWNLOAD OPTIONS
IN COLLECTIONS
Educational Films
Ephemeral Films
Uploaded by associate-yvonne-wang on
